Applications of pipelining to firmware

Abstract

It has been found that pipelining at the firmware level of machine organization can provide significant execution time benefits for certain types of instructions. The essential concept involved with this approach is the pipelining of operations within the hardware under direct control of the firmware, rather than the pipelining of microinstructions. Specifically, multiple data values exist within the machine's datapaths which have undergone different amounts of processing. This paper describes the application of these techniques to a specific pipelined computer. A brief description of the system level pipeline is provided with two examples of the firmware pipeline approach. The operations of floating point normalization and memory transfers have been described in detail.